Write For Our Blog

Blogging for Oxford University Press

What is a blog?

A blog is a type of website based on reverse chronological entries held together by an ongoing theme. Oxford University Press uses its blogs to foster dialogues, introduce our authors, publishing and staff, disseminate scholarship, and encourage intellectual conversation.

The OUPblog is a commentary-based blog for an academic audience. The talented authors, staff, and friends of Oxford University Press provide daily commentary on nearly every subject under the sun for the official academic publishing blog of Oxford University Press since July 2005. A source for learning, understanding, and reflection, we provide academic insights for the thinking world, whether essays, opinion pieces, analyses, quizzes, or fun facts.

The OxfordWords blog is a language-centric blog for a general audience from our Oxford Dictionaries team. It focuses solely on features about words, word origins, language, and dictionaries, and features magazine-style articles, English grammar and usage tips, interactive language features, word games, and competitions.

Who reads these blogs?

OUPblog is a recognized and well-regarded online source of opinion, reflection, and learning. Our articles are often picked up by online media and our authors have done radio, newspaper, and magazine interviews as a result of their blog posts. We're one of the most widely read academic blogs in the world with active social media promotion over Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google Plus.

The OxfordWords blog has a wide global audience interested in the English language (and language generally.) The audience includes many non-native speakers of English, so the blog's style is accessible, informative, and entertaining.

What do you look for?

We're looking for an article, lively in tone, much like that which you would find in a newspaper. Our blog posts usually argue a point, draw a line of argument, trace the emergence of a trend, or just discuss something interesting. Some topics lend themselves best to long-form essays, while others work better in list form. We also post Q&A's, quizzes, slideshows, videos, and audio files. The most important thing to remember is that we're not looking for an explicitly promotional piece. We want to spark a conversation.

Do you have any writing guidelines?

No technical expertise is needed. As this is written for an online audience, we try to make the pages web-friendly and appealing to read onscreen, such as including hyperlinks and images. Oxford University Press follows the Hart's Rules style guide, but the most important thing is to write as you would in your native English.

Submit your article as a Word document.

Single-space between sentences.

Indicate a new paragraph with a hard return, rather than an indentation.

Include a brief 2-4 sentence bio, including your academic webpage and any social media profiles.

Create hyperlinks (embedded references) for any/all direct references by highlighting the text. Don't use footnotes or end notes.

Include images that we have the rights or permission to use.

The title and subtitle of your post should be clear and succinct. Imagine what a person would query in Google to find out about this topic.